Call it an identity crisis of sorts. But for a career
science writer, I’ve found myself spending an unusual amount of time in the
past few years writing – and devotedly reading – true crime stories.

Call it also a logical consequence. I wrote a book about
poison, murder and the early days of forensic toxicology. I write a blog about
culture and chemistry, one that leads me inevitably into stories of lethal
cocktails and homicidal intent. When I see a tale of murder and mystery, I
usually wonder if there was a toxic weapon involved.

I realize that telling you this may make me sound a little
creepy and it’s not – promise – that I spend my days lurking around hoping for
a homicide. But I do look for
stories that allow me to practice what I occasionally think of as subversive
chemistry writing, narratives in which I can weave some toxicology, sneak a few
chemical formulas or Periodic Table references into the tale.

There’s more at play here, though, than my interest in
narrative story telling techniques.
Forensic toxicology raises some fascinating questions about the role of
scientific detective work. Can good chemistry always solve a murder? Even if we
find a poison in a body, does that always lead us to the killer? And even if we
know the killer, does that always lead us to justice?

Which brings me, of course, to The Atavist’s recent
successful true crime single, The Kalinka
Affair. The story is written
by Joshua Hammer, a former foreign bureau chief for Newsweek, and a man with a long-time fascination with murder himself.
His full-length books include Murder in
Yosemite (the story of a 1999 mass murder in the national park), Sherlock Holmes’ London, and Where Agatha Christie Dreamed Up Murder.

You’ve probably guessed by now that The Kalinka Affair involves poison and murder. That’s my focus more
than the author’s – this is foremost a story of a father’s full-fanatic drive to
find justice in the matter of his daughter’s death. That passionate, guilt-and-love driven parental determination drives the
narrative forward through almost 30 years of twists and turns, international
politics and criminal undertakings, and unforgiving rage. “Bamberski would leave
his job, burn through much of his life savings, and devote thousands of hours
to pursuing his quarry,” Hammer writes.

09/20/2012

We should have gone so well together. It was a scanned copy of The Royal Bestiary, a 13th century manuscript stored in the British Library, enhanced for the iPad with text and audio interpretation on every page. I was a giant nerd. Clearly, a match made in heaven.

But I don't think it's going to work out.

It's not that the book is terrible. In fact, parts of it are, objectively, pretty damn cool. We are, after all, talking about an opportunity to virtually thumb through the pages of a very old book. And the scans are excellent. You can see stains on the vellum, and the margin lines drawn by the scribe or illustrator to make certain that text and images were put into just the right place on every page. You can zoom in on the beautiful, colored and gilded drawings of bees and eagles, lions and centuars. On every page, there is, indeed, a little tab that you can tap to learn more about the animals you see in the pictures – especially helpful for the book's many imaginary animals, such as the leucrota. Leucrotas, you may be interested to know, happen when a male hyena mates with a female lion. The result of that partnership looks, for some reason, rather like a horse, but with a forked tail and a creepy, Jack Nicholson smile. The Medieval Bestiary assures me that the leucrota's "teeth" are actually a single piece of sharp bone, curved into a U shape. If I tap the "Listen" button, this information will be read to me by a soothing, female, British voice.

In short, A Medieval Bestiary does everything it promised to do. In fact, I'm sure this book could make somebody very happy. (Maybe an art student?) Just not me. That's because, while it does do everything it promised, A Medieval Bestiary does only that. And not a bit more. I, unfortunately, need the bit more.

The truth is that some of this is my fault. I read the description and then set my expectations rather higher than I should have. I can't really blame A Medieval Bestiary for being the book it is (and said it was) rather than the book I want to be. And yet. And yet.

A book like this needs context. I need to know about the genre of bestiaries, in general. Did the authors make up the clearly made-up animals (and the clearly made-up information about real animals)? Or were they writing down longstanding traditions? What was the point of the book? Am I supposed to be studying the natural world, or exploring my own morality? Do books like bestiaries have a role in the development of true taxonomy and biology, the same way that alchemy had a role in the development of chemistry and physics? I have no idea. Because A Medieval Bestiary doesn't tell me. In fact, I had to run a couple Google searches to even figure out the book's real name. This is the full extent of context it offers on itself:

A bestiary is a book of real and imaginary beasts, though its subjects can extend to plants and even rocks. It combines description of the physical nature and habits of animals with elaboration on the moral or spiritual significance of these characteristics.

This amazing book was produced in the first decade of the 13th century, and is one of the earliest bestiaries to feature vivid paintings of animals. They are set on gold grounds and in colourful frames, supplanting the line-drawn renderings that populated earlier bestiaries. These lavish illuminations would have made this a costly book to produce, and so it is likely that it was produced for an aristocratic, or even royal, owner who could read Latin or had a chaplain who could do so.

Even more frustrating was the interpretation within the book. A Medieval Bestiary is in Latin (and written in that sort of fancy medieval font that makes it difficult to read even if you do know Latin). But there is no translation of the actual text. The interpretation merely describes the illustrations. In some cases (but not all) that includes a summary of the text around the image, but even then that's almost worse, because what you get are stunted plot points of a story that probably would have been a lot more interesting to read for itself.

Basically, I look at A Medieval Bestiary and think of all that it could be, but isn't. Particularly with the iPad book format, there's such an opportunity here to add lots of context: History, philosphy, quotes and links to other works. Done right, a reader could come away from this understanding more about medieval society as a whole and the development of science from magical/religious art to rational tool. Instead, A Medieval Bestiary just wants to tell you what's going on in the pictures. There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm too old and too wise to waste much time thinking I can change a book into something it's not.

Besides, in the course of breaking up with it, I discovered that A Medieval Bestiary had been kind of misleading me all along. I paid the equivalent of $8 for this book (I was offered a free review code, but couldn't figure out where to apply it during the ordering process). But, turns out, this isn't exactly unique content. In fact, the whole thing is available as free PDFs on the website of the Royal Library. Some of the scanned pages there even come with the exact same interpretation as is offered in the iPad version. Which just kind of serves to make the shortcomings of the iPad book that much more apparent. I don't mind paying $8 for something really cool. I mind paying $8 for an iPad version of something I can get for free as a PDF. If the publishers – eBook Treasures – were going to convert A Medieval Bestiary to iPad, why not take advantage of that and do some stuff that you couldn't do with PDFs?

Sadly, I think it's time this book and I went our separate ways. Hopefully, we can still be friends. And, who knows, maybe in the future, when A Medieval Bestiary has had some time to grow, we can rekindle the relationship.

09/18/2012

I have a suggestion for the Download the Universe website, of which I am a regular reader. The current commenting system might make some people, including me, uncomfortable because it requires us to login through Facebook, Twitter, and similar systems. For example, if I choose to use Facebook-based login system, I have to let the app access to my basic info (including my friends IDs!). This is beyond what I am willing to share just to put a comment on any website. This might also be a reason that the website does not receive many comments.
I suggest you to make it a bit easier for people to comment.

Having experienced years of spam blizzards at my own blog, I thought requiring people to log in to comment would spare Download the Universe from the web's marauding bots. But I have also shared the commenter's irritation at having to let everyone know exactly what we're reading or listening to simply to gain access to those words or sounds.
So as an experiment, I am dropping the registration requirement. Quiet lurkers, please take this opportunity to share your thoughts about these reviews. (And please let us know about other ebooks worth reviewing!)

I
won’t lie: I didn’t much like Sam
Harris’ ebook Lying, and had I paid
money for it rather than received it as a free download, I might have felt
cheated. While I’ve enjoyed some of his
earlier work, this book felt flimsy and overly simplistic.

Harris
offered the free download when Jonah Lehrer’s deceptions were just beginning to
be seen as part of a larger pattern:
many of my colleagues felt that this was a cheap shot and an obnoxious
type of self-promotion, but I wasn’t offended and thought it might offer
insight into Lehrer’s deceit.

I
was wrong: what we have here is a book
that tries to make the case that lying is virtually always wrong, with little
more nuance than a “Just Say No” campaign.
The few scraps of science that are included— for example, a studies
showing that one tenth of the information shared by husbands and wives involves
deceit, and a full 38% of conversations among college students include at least
one lie— are fascinating.

But
they go nowhere. Given the high level of
deception found, it seems clear that lying is common human behavior and often serves
some useful purpose, a discussion of which could have been informative. Instead, we get lectures on why we should
always share difficult truths. We’re even given the classic example of learning
of an affair of which one partner is unaware, with nary a thought to the
possibility that the couple could have an open marriage or a mutually agreed
“don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Moreover,
Harris actually wants us to tell people that they do “look fat in that,” in
order to spur better wardrobe choices and/or weight loss and to avoid “robbing”
our friends or partners of a chance to change for the better. (No mention is
made of the possibility that such truth telling can be a form of hostility).

There’s
no discussion of the developmental significance of lying in a child’s
understanding of the minds of others, no look at the evolutionary aspects of
deception, no exploration of why social lies are so common— nothing here but
moralizing with little subtlety, let alone material that could guide understanding
of the sad situation that undid a promising journalist. Honest!

09/14/2012

Mars Curiosity, with its sky crane and all, is certainly impressive. But I'm a Cassini fan myself. It left Earth in 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004. It has winged around the ringed planet ever since, hurtling by Saturn's many, many moons along the way. Every year it has delivered images back to Earth that are not simply gorgeous but deeply informative about the outer zone of our Solar System. Its success and its stamina have gotten its mission extended twice. It will keep snapping pictures of Saturn and its moons until 2017, when it crashes into the planet.

I've tried to keep up with the flow of images at the Cassini web site, but after eight years of daily footage, there is just too much to handle. To appreciate everything it has found, we need curation.

One form of curation can be found at sites like Bad Astronomy, where Phil Plait regularly posts Cassini images that he finds particularly worthy. Thinx Media now provides curation of a different sort, by loading some 840 images into an app they call Cassini HD.

The images are organized into categories--starting with the planet itself, followed by images of its moons, and then its rings, and finally by false-color pictures. You can plow through the photos one at a time, swipe after swipe, or jump to two navigation systems: either a drop-down menu, or a gallery linked to a diagram of Saturn and its moons.

I preferred jumping around the Saturnian system. At the moment, my favorite moon of Saturn is Daphnis, a five-mile-wide rock that draws a thin path of ice and dust out of the planet's rings. If you like what you see, you can use Cassini HD's nicely integrated functions to email or tweet a photo, save it to the iPad's photo app, or send it to Tumblr or Facebook.

There are two big shortcomings of Cassini HD. For one thing, it's not particularly HD. You can't zoom in on details of the photos on the app. For a closer look at Titan or Enceladus, you will need to look at NASA's biggest versions of their images on their web site.

The other shortcoming is the text--the reason that I'm reviewing this app at Download the Universe. Each section of Cassini HD kicks off with a paragraph, or a few. Each photo comes with a one sentence caption, which you can expand into a longer version. But, as far as I can tell, all the text comes verbatim from NASA's web sites. I won't call this plagiarism, but I will call it disappointing. Every caption comes with an identical paragraph about the Cassini mission. One caption I came across informs you what Cassini will be doing in 2005--because it was written by someone at NASA in 2004. The captions point you to other pictures for further information, but they include the original links, so that you end up on NASA's web site instead of jumping to other images in the app. There's useful information to be gathered the text, but you will get little pleasure along the way. In this respect, Cassini HD is a far cry from The Solar System, which featured original text by the science writer Marcus Chown.

On balance, however, Cassini HD is a good value. The Solar System will set you back $13.99. Cassini HD will cost you just $1.99--and it's free tomorrow, when the app goes live. I like to know that even if I'm out of Wi-Fi range, I can always take a trip through Saturn's rings. The text may not sing, but the pictures are still transporting.

Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including Evolution: Making Sense of Life.